Obama Press Finding Out They Bought A Lemon

They may need a support group before the month is out. They could gather in New York or Washington where many victims reside. The meetings would start: “I’m Maureen [or David]. I’m a duped Barack voter. And I’m mad.”

The ranks indeed are filling with the disaffected and the disappointed — Chris Buckley, Maureen Dowd, David Brooks, David Gergen, and even that gynecological sleuth and blogger Andrew Sullivan. And then there is the very angry Marty Peretz. Their complaints are varied but expressed with equal amounts of remorse and bitterness. They all have been done wrong by Barack.

[1] Chris Buckley is in mourning over the loss of fiscal sobriety and the sense he has enabled a spend-aholic:

Mr. Obama is proposing among everything else $1 trillion in new entitlements, and entitlement programs never go away, or in the oddly poetic bureaucratic jargon, “sunset.” He is proposing $1.4 trillion in new taxes, an appetite for which was largely whetted by the shameful excesses of American CEO corporate culture. And finally, he has proposed $5 trillion in new debt, one-half the total accumulated national debt in all U.S. history. All in one fell swoop.

He tells us that all this is going to work because the economy is going to be growing by 3.2 percent a year from now. Do you believe that? Would you take out a loan based on that? And in the three years following, he predicts that our economy will grow by 4 percent a year.

[2] Maureen Dowd has multiple complaints. She’s miffed that [3] the post-racial president’s attorney general is playing the race card and she too has had it on the spending and business-as-usual fronts:

In one of his disturbing spells of passivity, President Obama decided not to fight Congress and live up to his own no-earmark pledge from the campaign.

He’s been lecturing us on the need to prune away frills while the economy fizzles. He was slated to make a speech on “wasteful spending” on Wednesday.

“You know, there are times where you can afford to redecorate your house and there are times where you need to focus on rebuilding its foundation,” he said recently about the “hard choices” we must make. Yet he did not ask Congress to sacrifice and make hard choices; he let it do a lot of frivolous redecorating in its budget.

He reckons he’ll need Congress for more ambitious projects, like health care, and when he goes back to wheedle more bailout billions, given that A.I.G. and G.M. and our other corporate protectorates are burning through our money faster than we can print it and borrow it from the ever-more-alarmed Chinese.

Team Obama sounds hollow, chanting that “the status quo is not acceptable,” even while conceding that the president is accepting the status quo by signing a budget festooned with pork.

Obama spinners insist it was “a leftover budget.” But Iraq was leftover, too, and the president’s trying to end that. This is the first pork-filled budget from a new president who promised to go through the budget “line by line” and cut pork.

On Face the Nation on Sunday, Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, dismissed the bill as “last year’s business,” because most of it was written last year.

But given how angry Americans are, watching their future go up in smoke, the bloated bill counts as this year’s business.

It includes $38.4 million of earmarks sponsored or co-sponsored by President Obama’s labor secretary, Hilda Solis; $109 million Hillary Clinton signed on to; and $31.2 million in earmarks sought by Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood with colleagues.

(Even Barack Obama was listed as one of the co-sponsors of a $7.7 million pet project for Tribally Controlled Postsecondary Vocational Institutions until he got his name taken off last week.)

And then there are the 16 earmarks worth $8.5 million that Emanuel put into the bill when he was a congressman, including money for streets in Chicago suburbs and a Chicago planetarium.

Then there’s [4] David Brooks who like Michael Douglas in Fatal Attraction, sounds like he is quite remorseful to have chosen the wrong date. Looking for a moderate, he wound up with a crazed leftist:

You wouldn’t know it some days, but there are moderates in this country — moderate conservatives, moderate liberals, just plain moderates. We sympathize with a lot of the things that President Obama is trying to do. We like his investments in education and energy innovation. We support health care reform that expands coverage while reducing costs.

But the Obama budget is more than just the sum of its parts. There is, entailed in it, a promiscuous unwillingness to set priorities and accept trade-offs. There is evidence of a party swept up in its own revolutionary fervor — caught up in the self-flattering belief that history has called upon it to solve all problems at once.

So programs are piled on top of each other and we wind up with a gargantuan $3.6 trillion budget. We end up with deficits that, when considered realistically, are $1 trillion a year and stretch as far as the eye can see. We end up with an agenda that is unexceptional in its parts but that, when taken as a whole, represents a social-engineering experiment that is entirely new. …

Those of us who consider ourselves moderates — moderate-conservative, in my case — are forced to confront the reality that Barack Obama is not who we thought he was. His words are responsible; his character is inspiring. But his actions betray a transformational liberalism that should put every centrist on notice. As Clive Crook, an Obama admirer, wrote in the Financial Times, the Obama budget “contains no trace of compromise. It makes no gesture, however small, however costless to its larger agenda, of a bipartisan approach to the great questions it addresses. It is a liberal’s dream of a new New Deal.”

And then there’s [5] David Gergen who frets that not enough time is being spent on the economy (oh, that) and too much on an overly ambitious agenda. So he calls for a “course correction.”

[6] Andrew Sullivan, back from his investigative work on the Sarah Palin pregnancy, has now discovered the fiscal conservatives have been had. Alas, his hopes for fiscal sobriety are being washed away in a spending spree worthy of a drunken sailor:

We are being presented with what can only be described as a massive increase in government spending and power with the only fiscal balance being wringing much more money from the successful. The president predicted a tight budget and spending control in his non-SOTU, and he appealed to fiscal conservatives by promising a long-term attack on entitlement spending. I see nothing here yet that fulfills that promise.

Meanwhile, [7] Marty Peretz, who attested to candidate Obama’s pro-Israel and tough foreign policy bona fides during the campaign, now is incensed the president has put into a high level national security post Chas Freeman, the Israel-bashing toady of the Saudis who assigned responsibility “both ways” for [8] 9/11 and bemoaned the [9] Chinese didn’t crack down on the Tiananmen Square protesters quick enough. He pleads with the president to [10] dump Freeman and writes in [11] language as bitter as any scorned lover:

But Freeman’s real offense (and the president’s if he were to appoint him) is that he has questioned the loyalty and patriotism of not only Zionists and other friends of Israel, the great swath of American Jews and their Christian countrymen, who believed that the protection of Zion is at the core of our religious and secular history, from the Pilgrim fathers through Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy. And how has he offended this tradition? By publishing and peddling the unabridged John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, with panegyric and hysteria. If Freeman believes that this book is the truth he can’t be trusted by anyone, least of all Barack Obama. I can’t believe that Obama wants to appoint someone who is quintessentially an insult to the patriotism of some many of his supporters, me included.

All in all it is one dismayed and bitter group, filled with recriminations and a bit of self-flagellation. And it’s not hard to recognize that, as in any grieving process, they have passed through denial (when all who criticized their beloved Obama were excoriated and ridiculed) and are in the second step: anger. They were misled or deluded into believing Obama was a moderate or an indefatigable supporter of Israel or a fiscal grown-up or a reformer (take your pick).

They and the rest of the country are figuring out the bitter truth: Obama bears little resemblance to the moderate and soothing figure who tied up John McCain in knots. He bears even less resemblance to the Agent of Change. Rather he’s pretty much the Chicago pol who went to the Senate to be its most liberal member.

And for the wounded Obama supporters, we can offer just one bit of counsel: you have lots of company. There are trading floors filled with sympathetic souls and businesses filled with stunned executives. They didn’t get what they bargained for either. Just ask [12] Jim Cramer. Oh yes, please do invite him to your sessions when he’s not busy with the “I lost my life’s savings” support group.

5 Responses to “Obama Press Finding Out They Bought A Lemon”

Impressive article, Michael. Also, it is a demonstration of your integrity because, and I mean this with all sincerity and warmth, nothing in your presentation even so much as verges on “I told you so”.

It will be interesting to watch, over the next few weeks, to what degree the liberal media actually turns on Obama. It will be interesting to see how that, combined with the growing number of tea parties, begins to affect the political environment.

Taffy,
I may not have had as much integrity as I thought I did. I did not write that article: I merely titled it, and then submitted it for your reading – AND TO LEAVE BEHIND A RECORD. I would never want to deny an author his/her due credit. I’ll make sure that that is more prominent, if need be.

I’m not about “I told you so’s” because ANYONE who comes to realize that Obama is a lemon – and a terrible choice for president – becomes an ally. I don’t want ANY barriers for such people. Just come into the fold – welcome – and let’s start talking about what we can do as Americans to reduce this guy’s influence and save as much of the country as we can.

I suppose if we truly go into the tank, when it’s too late, “I told you so’s” will be in order. But until then? Anyone who starts to oppose the massive government socialist Obama agenda is welcome. And no “I told you so’s” from my end! Rather just thank God someone else has finally seen the light. And the more people who see that, belatedly or otherwise, are more people to work toward the kind of government this country needs.

Obama not what you expected? You should all be ashamed of yourselves. I’m politically savvy and from Chicago. I anticipated this revolutionary change in government from reading between the lines of Obama’s rhetoric during his campaigns. Had the media done their job and played the objective card, flown to Chicago and Springfield and done some hands-on research, many questions would have come to light. From his community work on the South Side, his associations with Louis Farakhan, Rev Wright, the Chicago Machine et.al., to the scandal regarding his run for the state senate. And there was nothing remarkable about his years there under his mentor Emil Jones. Hillary raised the issue of Obama’s “present” votes in Springfield, yet noone checked the nature of those uncommitted votes.

Obama was an unknown when he ran for U.S. Senate; he was elected because of a fluke. He had an opportunity to display his remarkable speaking skills at the 2004 convention. He pledged to the voters of Illinois that he would fulfill his six-year Senate term in Congress and not seek higher office, yet not 18 months after arriving in D.C. he announced his run for President. His track record in the U.S. Senate is lackluster at best. He’s a career politician, nothing more nor less.

The man is an empty-suit with a good command of words. He talks the talk. . . but fails to walk the walk. He was after the golden ring, no matter who he used to get it. Every campaign promise has been broken: vindictive blame on the 8 year Bush administration as cause of all ills, ignorance of bi-partisanship, approval of “pork” laden bills, embracing conflicts of interests (lobbyists, tax dodges) in his cabinet, avoidance of input from economic advisory committee or health care committee, closing Guantanemo prison without a plan, spending trillions in economic recovery and bailouts without a plan, criticizing the war in Iraq, yet escalating the war in Afghanistan begun by the Bush administration.

From where I sit, the unions are running the show, along with all of the welfare community and ,as well the environmental coalition though climate-change is not a scientifically proven event. The country is trillions in debt and who has benefitted? Clearly all the coalitions who got Obama elected. What about everyman? You and I?

When will we hear the plan to destroy our health care system? I assume it will be available to Congress at midnight of the day Mme Speaker Pelosi calls for the vote. The powerful lobbyists of the pharmaceutical and insurance industries are formulating it now. Doctors, without whom there would be no health care system, are too busy with sick patients to
play this partisan game. There is no debate. The fiasco will ultimately result in even more professionals leaving the practice of medicine. Do the lawyers in Congress and the White House bunch honestly pride themselves with knowledge in this field?

I am a proud conservative Republican if you hadn’t guessed. A wise counselor once told me “never listen to the words, just watch the deeds.”
This was a slam dunk. Obama is a liar and a charlatan. I am sad that we are losing our country. To placate their fan clubs and to assure their re-elections, Obama, Emmanuel, Pelosi, Reid, Frank and Dodd are indebting our children and grandchildren on down the road.

Pick the honest man every time regardless of political issues. Forget the rhetoric, the charisma, the celebrity. Honesty and integrity are lasting; the rest are plastic and ephemeral.

Some wise men and women in the media are finally coming around. Perhaps, we will now see objective journalism so that the public has a realistic view of what is going on in D.C. ,both the good and the bad.
Hopefully those who pay taxes in this country will be less complacant next time around.

May our country never suffer through a fiaso like this again, though I don’t see how the cart can be righted once it’s fallen down the cliff in pieces.

I myself had no idea who Obama was. I was more “up in arms” over Hillary – who I KNEW was a Machiavellian Lady MacBeth. But then I heard the Jeremiah Wright sermon tapes. And I knew then and there that Obama was far and away the much greater evil. 23 years in THAT hate church with THAT preacher? “God damn America”? I don’t think so. That was my moment of crystal clarity. It was in fact that moment that got me into blogging. I worked very hard to do my part to keep him from being elected because I had such a powerful sense that he would destroy the country.